Rites & Desires

by Amanda Cherry

  It had come into the possession of the Cobalt City Police Department before even the Icons were around. Upon disposition of the case of the mad wizard in whose custody it had been found, it had been decided that the Eye was far too dangerous to be returned into private hands. The talisman had sat in the CCPD vault for some time before finally being donated to the British Museum, where it was locked away and never displayed.

  And in January of 1933, the British had unceremoniously sent it back. There was a scan in the file of a handwritten note from one of the museum’s curators at the time; although the handwriting was difficult to read in places, Ruby got the gist. The thing was too powerful. They didn’t want it. And, by the way, the fanatic who’s just been elected Chancellor of Germany has occult leanings, and let’s keep this thing as far from his clutches as possible. They’d even sent it back in this handy-dandy, hard-to-steal, heavily warded and dangerously electrified carrying case.

  Well, that part at least made sense. No possibly infinitely powerful items for Hitler--check. And it seemed the CCPD hadn’t known what to do with it after that. So it had sat in its case, collecting dust in the vault ever since. Neither the Icons, nor the Protectorate (who’d had a vault of their own at the Keep), had dared to move it into superhero custody. That had to be the thing she was looking for. Something so powerful that even the British Museum was uncomfortable housing it--much less the city’s most notable superheroes--seemed like just the kind of thing Loki would point her to. She’d have asked him in person, but he still had yet to make an appearance in her building. The more time that passed, the more she was becoming convinced he really had just tricked her out of millions of dollars of real estate with no intention to ever use the place.

  She decided to bring the Blights to her office just after the last of the damned lawyers had left for the day to finalize plans. She’d even gotten Plague to brush up against the most irksome of the attorneys in hopes of giving him a cold. That would show him for making her meeting run over. Well, probably not, but she’d spend the weekend enjoying the occasional thought of him feeling as miserable as she had while he’d droned on about the nuances of renewing expiring artist contracts.

  She’d have no need to understand nuance if she just had her powers back!

  And she’d be well on the road to that in just a few hours if all went well. Tonight they were going after the Eye. It was nearing five o’clock now, and if history was any indication, the sun would be down by eight or so. And Ruby knew as well as anyone else that the ostensibly fiscally responsible CCPD wouldn’t be staffing non-essential positions like evidence clerks on a Friday night, even at the occult vault. The place was likely to be empty. It almost sounded too easy.

  Almost.

  And the Blights were turning out to be a lot of help, much more help than she’d expected from any friends of Loki’s. Other than Doubt (who spent the whole evening being, well, doubtful), they’d been generous with suggestions as to how they might help with a break-in. The small but critical differences in the way the powers of Ruin and Decay manifested themselves were particularly interesting and, of all the Blights Loki had sent, those two clearly made the most sense to have along for a heist.

  They were deep in the throes of walking through the night’s strategy when an unfamiliar sound disturbed their conversation. The unusual, repetitive, digitized beeping concerned the lot of them at first; this was a new building and the noise might be attached to any number of alarm systems. Fire was quick to assure the group that the building was, at least, not currently burning. And while a relief, it did nothing to solve the mystery of where the noise was coming from.

  It was Doubt, up and pacing and certain that none of the others’ theories were any good, who spotted the source of the offending klaxon. "Your phone is ringing," she declared flatly, pointing at the diminutive device where it sat on Ruby’s desk.

  Ruby, who was seated at the small conference table on the far side of her office, popped out of her chair and frowned distinctly. That was pretty well impossible. The Starphone Ruby had left out on her desk was her personal one. She had several similar devices, each differently accessible to others. There was a phone for building matters that only Arsho knew the number to, a phone for top-level business matters that only her most lucrative artists and their managers had access to, and she even had one connected to the business network that her receptionists were able to put office calls through to. But the one sitting on her desk was her personal phone, and it was new. Literally no one had the number, so why in hell was it ringing?

  Ruby stalked over to her desk, wondering if maybe Loki had some power to ring a phone without knowing the number, and at the same time steeling herself for the tirade she was about to lay down on whatever unsuspecting telemarketer had randomly dialed her private number. She considered for a moment just hitting the "ignore" button, but decided she was mad enough to need to confront whoever had caused this disturbance.

  "Yes?" snapped Ruby as she punched the button that allowed the call to come through the speaker, her tone making no secret of the fact that she was not happy with whomever was on the other end of the call.

  "Ruby?" the voice on the line answered.

  Ruby sucked in a deep breath and took a seat in her desk chair, regarding her Starphone with potent curiosity. "Jaccob?" she asked, having taken just a moment to process that his was most certainly the voice she had heard.

  "Hi," Jaccob Stevens answered, sounding friendly and familiar, as though he genuinely had no idea that this call was an oddity.

  "Hi," she replied as sweetly as she could while still completely baffled. "Please don’t take this the wrong way, but how did you get this number?"

  Jaccob chuckled nervously. "It’s pretty easy to get anybody’s number when you own the network," he admitted sheepishly.

  It was Ruby’s turn to chuckle.

  "You don’t think that’s creepy, do you?" he asked after a moment. "I mean, I sort of wondered if it was creepy, but then I thought maybe you wouldn’t mind and--"

  "Actually," she interrupted him, "I think it’s kind of cute." In all honesty, had it been anyone else, she would have found it creepy and off-putting. But when coming from the man who she had every intention of seducing presently, and coupled with such an adorably contrite attitude about the whole thing, she found it rather endearing.

  "Oh, good," Jaccob answered with an audible sigh of relief. "I was a little worried."

  "Well, don’t be," she reassured him. "Now, to what do I owe this benign stalking? You didn’t just call me for no reason."

  "No," Jaccob admitted, "I didn’t." He took a deep breath.

  Ruby looked up at the Blights and shrugged.

  Doubt rolled her eyes, and Plague seemed totally uninterested, but the others appeared to be almost as curious to hear the next bit as Ruby herself was.

  "I was just thinking," he began again, his nerves clear in his voice, "I really enjoyed our dinner the other night--"

  "As did I," Ruby encouraged, hoping to assuage a bit of his obvious trepidation. He was about to ask her out. She knew it the same as she knew that corporate lawyers were annoying, and she couldn’t help but grin wickedly at her phone as Jaccob continued.

  "So I thought," he added, hesitating only for a moment. "Do you think you’d like to get dinner tonight?"

  Ruby’s heart sank. Tonight she had plans. Big plans. Plans she’d been working on for days, plans she was not at all keen to cancel.

  Quickly, she weighed the pros and cons in her mind of putting the heist off another week. Having dinner with Jaccob was a lovely development and a step in a direction she absolutely intended to go, but having her powers back was paramount. And after all, dinner with Jaccob would only go better once she was restored to her proper self. With her powers fully returned, she could easily make him forgive her for turning him down now. With a sigh and a scowl, she answered quietly.

  "I have a business thing tonight," she droned. "It’s pretty important, and
I can’t get out of it." She hoped that by sounding as disappointed as possible, he would get the hint to ask her out for another day.

  "I know what that’s like," he replied, seeming barely disappointed with her answer.

  Ruby smiled. Of course he knew what that was like. He ran an even larger corporation than she did.

  "And I also know how much fun those things aren’t," he added. "So how about after? I know a place down in Quayside with a fantastic late-night happy hour. What do you say? Around ten?"

  Ruby’s face brightened into a grin she hadn’t worn since her powers had gone missing. "Can we say ten-thirty?" she asked. That would surely give her enough time to acquire the item and get over to Quayside.

  "We certainly can," Jaccob answered, his easy tone telling her he was more than a little bit pleased with this development.

  "Well then, it’s a date."

  "Excellent," Jaccob declared. "I’ll text you the address. See you tonight."

  "See you tonight," Ruby affirmed. "G’bye."

  "Bye," Jaccob managed to say, just as Ruby’s finger found the button to end the call. Well, that had been an interesting development. She was still grinning from ear to ear when she looked up from her phone to address the Blights.

  "So," she said, rising from her seat to take a deep, self-satisfied breath, "we have a hard end time. Do we need to change our plans at all?"

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Cobalt City Police Department kept their super-secret occult vault separate from their standard evidence lockers. Ruby remembered reading about it having been broken into a few years back, although at the time she hadn’t been bothered to find out details. This whole week she’d been kicking herself for that. Maybe in the future she’d pay some attention to the news and not just the entertainment rags. But in the present, all she’d really needed was the location of that vault. She’d sent Plague and Pestilence to the public library to do some digging. She’d chosen the two of them because they looked the most like the students she saw coming and going when she occasionally drove past. Fire would have fit in as well, with her copious piercings and brightly colored hair, but Ruby was wary of the possibility of burning the place down.

  Ruby mostly detested public spaces and willingly declared her distaste for the unwashed masses. She found a kind of sick humor in having sent the two Blights she most equated with the kind of people who hung out in the central library. The two of them had managed, with little difficulty, to ascertain the location of the vault. It was on one of the less-populated streets in one of the more populated parts of town. Approaching would pose little difficulty.

  Pestilence would be meeting the rest of them there, having gone ahead to rally the neighborhood sewer rats into chewing up the wiring of the CCPD’s security system. Ruby tried not to think too hard about sewer rats, but was glad at least to have Pestilence on her side. She would hate to be fighting against the person who could amass a spontaneous army of feral vermin.

  The rest of the party all arrived separately at the nearest public car park, Ruby in her town car and the Blights by various means of public transit. In case of street-side surveillance, she’d thought it better that they muster at the last possible moment.

  Never one to be less than perfectly attired for any occasion, it occurred to Ruby as she closed the distance between her car and the alley where she was to meet the others that she looked a bit cliché. In her black leather leggings, low-heeled boots, and moto jacket, and with a knit cap pinned securely to hide her copper locks, she cut every bit the figure of the comic-book cat burglar. Of course, there was a reason stereotypes arose in the first place, and Ruby found her ensemble to be both functional and appropriate.

  When the group gathered in the alley adjacent to the police building, only Doubt commented on Ruby’s outfit. The others immediately busied themselves with breaking in. Pestilence made it clear that not only were the security cameras down for the moment, but the four-legged cause of that condition would be easily identified. A malfunction would seem far less suspicious when it had clearly come from a rodent infestation. That was the good news. The bad news was that if the proper replacement cables were in the building, it wouldn’t take long for the system to be back up and running.

  That meant they needed to work quickly. They’d decided to make their entrance via a fire door that opened into a narrow alley between the police building and the art school that backed up to it. During the day, this alley would likely be full of hipster art students smoking clove cigarettes, complaining about the high prices at the Alibi Room, and planning their takedown of the establishment. But after dark on a Friday night in summertime, the place was blessedly empty. Doubt spent her time in the alley making sure it stayed that way. She had no problem changing the minds of any innocent passers-by who thought for a moment about using the alley as a short cut.

  Ruin had no difficulty popping the lock on the door and at the same time seeing to it that the attached alarm wouldn’t sound. Beyond the door stood a narrow landing to a concrete staircase that seemingly switched back endlessly both above and below.

  "Basement," Plague whispered, pointing downward. Ruby took point as the group of them clambered onto the landing and headed to the lower levels where the vault was installed. She led them down the stairs, pausing with only momentary panic when the energy-saving motion-activated lights flickered on. They proceeded down the stark hallway outside of the fire stairs and turned the corner at a sign clearly marked "Vault" with arrows pointing in the prescribed direction.

  "I can’t believe they’re really that dim," Ruby commented quietly.

  Doubt shook her head. "They just presume anyone down here has the right to be down here," she reminded Ruby. "If someone needs to check something into that vault, the last thing anyone wants is to have them wandering the basement looking for it."

  Ruby shrugged. Doubt could be a real stick in the mud sometimes, but she had a point. The signage was definitely there to steer anyone with legitimate business toward the vault. There was a hanging tile outside of the door to the anteroom and a prominent sign on the door itself. The solid metal door was locked, but Ruin had no more trouble getting through it than he had with the exterior, and soon the lot of them were inside.

  On the surface, the anteroom for the CCPD occult vault looked like it could be any evidence room in any police station anywhere in the world. Just as they had done in the hallway, the lights switched on automatically to show that the place was, as Ruby had suspected, currently unoccupied. There was a counter straight ahead of them, separated from the rest of the room by a glass partition, with a locking bolt on a sliding section at one end. There were shelves visible on the near side full of empty boxes, bags, and crates, and labels and signs all over touting such sage wisdom as "Authorized Personnel Only" and "Have Documentation Ready". A door on the far right seemed to lead from the reception area back behind the counter. Ruby inclined her head toward it just in time to see that Ruin had already done his thing, and the door was standing wide open.

  The group passed behind the counter and crossed immediately to an overlarge blast door hidden behind some flimsy metal shelving. It was double dead-bolted and hung with half a dozen placards informing would-be intruders of exactly which codes and statutes non-authorized entrants were violating. Ruby, of course, didn’t give a damn. Ruin was through that door in scarcely more time than it had taken him to get through the previous two, even though it was clear to all observing that this door was made of sterner stuff than the others.

  Beyond the blast door, they found their quarry. There was no mistaking the door to the occult vault for anything but what it was. The giant round door with its spindled handle and multiple dials took up the better portion of the wall before them.

  "Uhhhh--" Ruin blanched, stumbling over what to say about it.

  Ruby guessed he had never been called upon to open a lock of this magnitude before.

  Decay placed his hand on his brother’s arm and shook his head. "I
got this," the portly man said. He jerked his head sideways in a "follow me" motion and turned promptly on his heel. The group of Blights followed him wordlessly through the anteroom and out from behind the counter.

  "You’ve got what?" Ruby asked, clearly confused as she followed them out of the vault room and into the hallway. "Where are we going?"

  "Can’t use the door," Doubt piped up. "He has a harder time ruining things he can’t see, like the tumblers in the locks in that vault."

  "You want in quick," Decay piped up as he led the group around the corner, "then we’re going through the side."

  Ruby frowned. But her look of consternation turned to one of amazement as Decay turned to face the wall.

  He ran his hand gently over the putty-colored concrete and as he did, it began to come apart. As though brushing the crumbs off a cookie and watching it crumble in reply, the concrete began disintegrating into sand-fine particles, raining down a fine dust onto the floor. It only took a few passes for him to get a feel for the process, causing the dust to spill from his fingers at an alarming rate. It was scarcely a minute before Decay was up to his knees in the crumbled concrete. The others had moved back, as to not become buried themselves.

  Ruby stood just on the edge of the ever-growing dust pile and watched as the indentation grew.

  It seemed effortless. With every pass of his hand, a swath of the wall turned to powder and fell. The air was growing thick with the concrete dust, and Ruby had to cover her mouth with her sleeve. Difficulty in breathing notwithstanding, she was exceedingly pleased. Her glee came to an abrupt halt just minutes into the process when Decay’s expert ministrations uncovered a mesh of steel rebar buried nearly a foot into the wall of the vault.